European Expressive Arts Spring Symposium 2014

The longing for nature, for re-finding a ”lost” harmony with the more-than-human world still lingers in the modern psyche. Our creation myth expressed in the Old Testament as the Garden of Eden, tells about the original paradise and Adam’s and Eve’s fall.Today, Eden may be seen as a metaphor for all the plants, wild animals and forests that make up the garden of the earth. In eco-psychology, this garden can be called our ecological Self.As in the myth, by tasting the apple from the tree of life we develop knowledge and differentiation that separate us from nature. In conventional biblical thinking, we still live in exile. But once you reject the literal idea of evil and a Fall from the Garden, man is no longer cut off from his source. We - and our clients - can learn to reconnect with the wisdom of nature - through the arts.We want to celebrate our human dependency on the green rooted beings. We express our sisterhood with the wild four-legged and furred ones, all those beings breathing in water, and the feathered peoples.Come and join the exploration of how the arts let us revisit and reimagine the inner and outer relationships to the earthly beings we co-inhabit the garden with.